MEDICAL BLOG IN GENRISTIC DIMENTION

Abstract

Nowadays there is growing popularity of medical blogs as new communicative environment and one of the promising areas of linguistic knowledge. However, in Ukrainian linguistic studies, there are few works devoted to exploring their genre characteristics that predetermines the relevance of this research. The purpose of the work is to analyze the medical blog as a genre of Internet communication. To achieve this aim, we designed and fulfilled the following objectives: to clarify the criteria for identifying a medical blog as an independent genre and to describe its genre characteristics. The methodology of this research included general scientific and linguistic methods and techniques: a descriptive method, observation techniques, comparisons and generalizations, discourse analysis, conversational analysis. The genre characteristics of medical blogs have been analyzed based on T.V. Shmeleva’s genre model. The communicative purpose, the author’s role and representation as a test addressor and the characteristics of potential addressee, the image of the past, the image of the future, and the type of dictum context and the linguistic tools for their implementation into the texts. The communicative goal of a medical blog is to convey the professional opinion of a specialist to readers, highlight issues that most often arise in medical practice, and disseminate medical and scientific knowledge among Internet users that is typical of information genres. Medical blogs also promote a healthy lifestyle and illustrate the nuances of medical procedures to help readers choose the right strategy for keeping fit and healthy. This type of communicative behaviour implements the informative and imperative goals of blogging. The author is presented from the standpoint of education, professionalism, responsibility, unselfishness and morality. Another distinctive feature is no phenomena of author’s anonymity, “virtual” and speech masks inherent in the diary blogs. The medical blog provides an unlimited number of recipients: fellow doctors and patients. This is an initial genre, providing for the extension of the communication of the addressor-addressee in the future. Dictum context of a medical blog is focused on reality, with a clear scientific position and rationality. The authors mainly use standard speech patterns within this type of genre.